Telecommunications equipment is frequently stored in datacenters, central offices and remote huts. Datacenters, central offices and huts provide carefully controlled environmental conditions to accommodate sensitive telecommunications equipment from damage. Maintaining such a constant environment despite outside environmental fluctuations can often be costly. In turn, datacenters frequently charge significant fees for datacenter use. Frequently, the datacenter space is leased by the square foot or rack space. Thus, the less surface area a telecommunications rack covers, the lower the storage cost, and or the better utilization of the entire facility. Typical servers can weigh in the range of 50 pounds per rack unit, and mission critical backbone routers weigh over 500 pounds each. Due to the limited seismic capacity of today's typical racks, these critical network components are either housed in half filled racks or in full racks which exceed the seismic capacity of the rack.
As a result of the economic incentive to increase the density of telecommunications equipment per surface area unit, a greater weight will be place on each rack. Thus, not only is a rack with a minimal footprint needed, but a rack is needed that is also structurally strong enough to support a significant amount of telecommunications equipment during a catastrophic event such as an earthquake.